damaspi

I was just looking for a Wiki written in Java so we can deploy it on our favourite application server platform.

I made some implementations with Frank's wiki http://tomcat.efsol.com/friki/view which is a nice wiki. (rude, first generation wiki)

This implementation seems to me much richer and the idea of joining wiki and blogs is great.

I work in a large european governmental institution, where I am partly project manager, partly architect, partly developer and partly support, everybody thinking that I am doing each of these tasks full-time.

I have an eclectic education (chemistry, financial and commercial sciences, computer science) and worked previously in a bank (technical organisation).

I studied with punched cards with the assembler of the IBM 360, where the most challenging issues were to be sure to have a place in the queue for the card punchers, be sure not to let drop your box with your cards, and have enough money on your account for processing time. Of course, you had to wait the day after that a truck comes back with your listings from the data centre (showing your syntax errors in your Job Control Language cards).

I really began to understand computers when it was possible to put them on a table and unscrew the thing, so I started in the eighties with a TRS-80, before buying a wonderful AT 6Mhz with 30 Megabytes hard disk and 1Mb RAM (I was sure that 4.77 Mhz was too slow, and that 20 Mb HD and 640K RAM were not enough).

So, when working in the bank, I introduced with my manager a computer in the branch, developed a basic word processor with mail merge in Basic and we began to use it to contact our customers (maybe we were early spammers :-( but at least we increased our numbers for placements, permanent instructions and the like).

I founded a computer club to help people wanting to develop applications for their customers (it was Clipper Summer 87) and later we switched to Borland Delphi.

Although I program(med) in various languages (C, C++, Basic, Object Pascal, and of course Java), and can go very deep in technology, my interest always remain in what the technology can bring to the users, for helping them performing their tasks, for communicating, etc.

I love simplicity and SnipSnap for that, since I think that software must be an extension of people's mind, a real tool in the sense that it extends our body to give us additional possibilities, such as telling parts of one's life to perfect strangers.

I always think also that we must have an nice "out-of-the-box" experience, meaning that we just have to install, configure and go, everything works. It is only in the domains that the user chooses himself that he can become more expert, go in the guts of the software (thanks to Open Source), extend it to scratch his itches, and of course contribute to the advance of humanity (humbly)...

Thanks to you for that experience !

Some comments on MDA: http://javangelist.snipsnap.org/comments/2003-09-16

SnipSnap and Google